How the World Ends
by Bone White Butterfly
Summary: As the soul of a candle would twine round the smothered flame, so too the gray column of stone rose, adrift in death. Ashes fell into darkness, never to rise. Never again a child’s laugh, its breath, its despair as it curled into the cold embrace.
1. Soul of a Candle

_How the War Ends_

—

What with the nightmare of my parents' divorce, selling the house in a dying market, and…hmm…my freshman year of college, it's a surprise I haven't gone into epileptic fits. I finally had to sit down (hell with my busy schedule) and just write.

Anyway, here's to taking some time out of your day to relax. Here's to writing (and reading) slow.

—

_One tower._

_Alone._

_As the soul of a candle would twine round the smothered flame, so too the gray column of stone rose, adrift in death. Ashes fell into darkness, never to rise. Never again a child's laugh, its breath, its despair as it curled into the cold embrace. Wrapped in this frigid shroud, the white flame trembled and fell. A bleeding ember, it, and all it had touched and scorched black, lay still, strewn across the frozen landscape._

_In the starless midnight the tower loomed over them all, and all, seeing or no, stared back._

_The long-threatened, cold December rain finally fell from the sky. Water washed blackened stone and seeped into the white to turn the world a sodden, lifeless gray. Blind to human enmity, the rain cried for all. It caressed the brow of an ebon skull, and it drowned flaming hair crushed against a heart that had stilled, still sobbing._

_Alone, a single drop shivered in a cradle of curved glass—an eyeglass lens, the most useless protector, the most deceitful traitor, which, instead of sparing the child, had only served to focus his tormented gaze upon the world's horrors. The teardrop from heaven lay safe for one transient moment. Then it was swept over the glass edge and forced to rejoin its brethren in their journey towards death. Might had already fallen through the cracks into the mire of the earth, as had blood, finally united and indivisible after having been shed and spilled indiscriminately to the ground. Now the rain, too, sped helplessly towards the doom found in the grooves of shattered stone._

_The stream flowed inexorably past crushed limbs under fallen debris. Directly in its path a limp, white, skeletal hand lay splayed out across a red pool. Neither would be moved, and the stream flowed on. Only the rain disturbed the open palm. It bore down on the flesh, as though determined to wear the furrowed life line down to be as indiscernible as the heart's. It had no force, though, and nothing changed. The lines remained the same. The base of a dark wand still rested on the end of one tapered finger and gleamed with the power of a half-uttered spell, never to be finished, never to be heard again._

_The rain died down to a murmur and continued on only in a muffled sob. The pool of water—to call it a gentler name, though a rose by any other remains that familiar red—the water surrounding the deadened hand, it threw back a reflection of the tower spiraling high. In the rippling scene the gray monolith seemed a serpent, its head upraised in wary search for more predators. Or, perhaps, prey. From the highest shattered window a shredded cloak lay half-in, half-out the gaping, saw-toothed maw and writhed in the wind, a darting, slavering tongue._

_The tree line had shrunken back, beating a fearful retreat that left a careless trail of sodden ash and centaur bones. To the west, fires played dead. Their smoldering remains bided time, hidden with the townsfolk under collapsed rooftops. Only the thestrals circled the ruins without fear, but even they would not dare a sound._

_The world lay silent as the soul of a candle burned too bright drifted home. All lay still, save for the tower rising into the sky, still standing and standing still, for it had known all along. It had always known how the war would end—how all wars always end._

_With a bang._

_Then a whimper._

_Then nothing, nothing at all._


	2. Prodigal

Rubble exploded. Fueled by blazing light, in every trajectory, it careened from the base of the tower and crashed indiscriminately. Skulls became bone meal, the dying the dead. Thestrals screamed. The air shook from the blast. Mindless of it all, a figure, half drenched, half dry, strode out of the gaping hole at the tower's base. Rain pattered down on a set jaw and straightened shoulders. The wet areas of shirt spread and traveled down to meet the long-drenched waist. Cotton clung sheer to tense, unmarked arms as a wand's whipping movement ripped a collapsed stone wall off the youth crushed beneath. Crouching down for an inspection of the victim revealed a taut and clenched spine through the sopping white shirt. The back muscles smoothed after a moment and turned to face the rasping boy as the wall crashed back down on top of him.

It became a song of crouching, rasping, and crashing with a steady chorus of walking away before the next refrain. The whole landscape of rubble shifted, similar yet changed, and none for the wiser, except the newly dead.

The pile of granite trapping the white arm's body never rose. It was merely eyed and turned away from in distaste.

The boy lay with a stone for a bruising pillow. Rain had washed away his blanket of ash, and, wide-eyed, he shivered in delirium. One foot came to stand at each of his hips, but there was no glimmer of awareness in his blank gaze that a towering man had stepped in front of his view of the distant column of stone. He only blinked when the man leaned curiously to one side and the tower seemed to grow two heads.

In one final stoop, long fingers reached out and wrapped around a fallen pair of spectacles. One of the lenses had been knocked out, but the other reflected the boy in a blurred way, showing instead a hollowed porcelain doll whose chest moved shallowly in an imitation of life and whose eyes stared unseeingly. He lay broken on the stone, discarded by the children who had ceased to cherish him. Then, gently, he was lifted into the arms of one who had never before cared for dolls.

Dark hair dripped limp and framed the young, pale face, submissive for the first in its life as it soaked his new possessor's already wet cotton shirt to the point of saturation. By twist of fate, the boy had found a perfectly shaped hollow beneath a long collarbone and burrowed. For warmth. It was ignored. The destination was the far more important focus. Rain replaced the robes that had gone missing and billowed behind long strides. The walk across the ruptured flagstones was haste and hesitancy juxtaposed. No sooner was a corpse carelessly stepped over, then a minute sob would be given a wide berth.

At some point in this intricate back-and-forth dance across the castle ruins, the rainfall whipped itself up into a second torrent. Eyes closed as a small body curled tighter into his. Then they snapped open. The surrounding devastation seemed to quail under the sweep of the dark gaze. A sharp nod to the howling darkness was the only warning.

A sinkhole of crushed stones led to a dark and gaping mouth at the tower's base. Man and boy had crossed the depression in seconds. The inside of the dark, round hole offered protection from the rain, but not from the water sweeping across the ground, towards the mouth, and in, plunging down each granite step into the depths of the earth. The dark gleaming of the unnatural stream matched that found in the eyes that glanced upward before narrowing.

The boy slipped from one arm to be held by the waist. The scarred brow found a new place to fit alongside a clenched throat.

Deep in the throat of the underground passage, with water rushing past their legs, the man raised his wand to aim at the stubborn upper teeth, those jutting stones that formed the rim of the gaping hole in the spiraling tower.

A crack of lightning in the distance mimicked the cutting motion of the wand.

The teeth were knocked flying, and rubble crashed down, closing the mouth. What small light that had come from the night winked out, and they were swallowed in darkness. The surge of water dwindled to a soft trickling. Two feet splashed down the sodden steps. Two more hung limp. Uncalled for, or at least not aloud, light flooded a wand tip, revealing the short stretch of stair that led down to the flooded hall.

The last steps brought the water level knee, hip, waist, then chest deep before the ground finally evened out. The boy was submerged up to the neck when the final step was taken with trepidation, only to find they had already hit bottom. After that, the laborious chore of wading down the passage began. Making it no easier was the need to keep the wand above water, not to mention the head of an infernally small child.

He froze as two arms wrapped weakly around his neck. The boy looked up at him, eyes unfocused. Not looking, he realized, merely craning upwards to avoid inhaling the frigid water. The floor had descended an inch or two, something hardly noticeable in normal circumstances, but to someone half-dead and already underwater up to the chin, it was cause for terror.

It seemed an eternity before he hoisted the child up and let the small neck curl over his shoulder. He frowned. Boy? Child? Next he would be calling the lad a helpless babe. Never mind that the boy was weaker than one at the moment. He stared ahead, raised his wand high, and continued his journey down the flooded corridor.

It was a bit of a shock for both of them as they passed through a shield charm onto a patch of dry floor. With the buoyancy of water gone, it was impossible to lift even the boy's meager weight with one arm. Accordingly, the lad dropped like a stone. He hit the floor, gasped, and looked around widely with his eyes squinted to slits. His arm shot out. The hand plunged through the shield that circled them and into the water. Startled, he yanked it back. The pale flesh came away dry.

All this was watched. A thousand barbed statements formed on the tongue but never made it past the lips. With a measured breath, he turned from the boy and faced the portrait. It had been knocked free of the wall in the initial bombardment, he supposed, though it didn't truly matter how the nymph, done in cools oil colors, had come to lie face up on the floor. On its back or upside down, a portrait was a portrait.

He nodded at the somewhat blurry nymph.

On cue, she croaked, "Password?"

Dark eyes stared down at the boy shivering on the floor. Here was the impasse. Wordless spells and lost eyeglasses had brought them thus far, but now, whatever was done, the boy's simple trust in him would be shattered.

He asked himself why he cared.

In the voice he had long perfected, like hissing silk, he said aloud, _"Prodigal."_

The boy couldn't have gone more rigid if he had been bespelled.

On the floor, the portrait's frame clicked open. He propped it open with one foot. The nymph, her features having started to run because of the damp, looked up in question. His eyes hardened. The wand snapped into place, aimed at her face. Two words. Just two word. Why, after all this time, were those two words so hard to say? Was he ashamed?

"_Adavra Kadavra!"_

The painted nymph and the boy crumpled as one. He kicked open the dead portrait.

The boy stumbled away, through the shield and into the water, only to fall back, hacking. With a long suffering sigh, his savior gathered him up in two powerful, unforgiving arms. The man stepped forward, ignoring his struggling burden, and fell forward through the opening in the floor.

They landed upright. In one last bout of strength, the boy tried to push himself away. Not enough, but he was allowed to fall. With a moan, he painstakingly pulled his head from the flagstones and stared. _"You…"_

Severus Snape ignored him and reached back through the square hole in the wall. In the hall, an arm stretched straight up from the floor before maneuvering to pull the ajar portrait shut. There was a sound of water surging past the wall that drowned what the boy was trying to scream long enough for the fugitive killer to turn and cast a spell he had long longed to.

* * *

**The writing is a tad confusing, yes, and that's my fault on purpose. I wanted to do something with imagery. Ah well.**


End file.
